Feminist `Dinner Party' finds permanent setting

The controversial tribute to famous women by feminist artist Judy Chicago has bounced among exhibitions at 16 locations in six countries since it was unveiled in 1979, including a 1981 show at a South Loop loft in Chicago, the artist's hometown.

But now, after spending the last six years in a New Mexico warehouse, "The Dinner Party" has a permanent address.

On Friday, it went on display at the Brooklyn Museum of Art as part of the museum's permanent collection. It is the first work in a planned center for the study of art by women.

The enshrining of a work that has been hailed as a breakthrough for women and derided as pornographic kitsch marks a major milestone not only for the artist but also for the early feminist movement.

In finding a place in a major museum's collection, "The Dinner Party" has achieved recognition from an art world still divided about its merits. But its transformation into a museum piece also underscores the fact that the early struggles of the women's liberation movement are receding further into the past.

"The piece has been very influential," said Amelia Jones, an art history professor at the University of California at Riverside. "It has been viewed by more people than probably any other piece of contemporary art. Whether it's still emotionally powerful--probably not for younger women."

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art saw a fourfold increase in attendance when it debuted the piece in 1979, and about 85,000 people trooped to Brooklyn in 1980 when "The Dinner Party" was exhibited at the museum that has become its home.

To bring "The Dinner Party" to the artist's hometown, 300 volunteers raised $270,000 in 1981 after Chicago's major museums declined to exhibit the work.

"No one wanted to take a chance on it," recalled Hedy Ratner, co-president of the Women's Business Development Center and one of the volunteer organizers. "It was a first. It made galleries, curators, museums more aware of the role that women could play in art."

The exhibit was held in donated space in a Printers Row loft building, and in its opening week it drew 500 people a day, outpacing previous showings in Boston and Cleveland.

Over the years, more than 1 million people have seen "The Dinner Party," Chicago said at a preview last week.

With the passage of time and the rise of women in politics, business and the arts, it can be difficult to understand why so many people turned out to see a work whose point might seem obvious now--to give women a place at the table by proclaiming their contributions through the ages.

Part homage and part political statement, "The Dinner Party" consists of 39 place settings neatly arranged on an enormous triangular table, 48 feet on a side. The place settings bear the names of important female figures from history, myth and religion. The work's triangular tile floor is covered with the names of 999 other women.

Among the guests at the table are the Greek poet Sappho, England's Queen Elizabeth I, early women's rights activist Susan B. Anthony, writer Virginia Woolf and American artist Georgia O'Keeffe. Others, such as Primordial Goddess, existed only in myth, but their inclusion is a reminder of the ancient tradition of honoring women as the givers and nurturers of life.

A place at the table

Each place setting consists of an embroidered runner decorated in a style appropriate to the woman being honored, outsize cutlery, a goblet and a dinner plate large enough to hold a porterhouse.

Not that the plates were ever intended for use. Ranging from simple, painted patterns to elaborate, three-dimensional outcroppings, the designs of most of the plates are symbolic representations of female genitalia.

That aspect of the work has outraged conservatives over the decades. The artist's attempt to donate "The Dinner Party" to the University of the District of Columbia in 1990 collapsed because of the opposition of politicians such as then-Rep. Robert Dornan, a California Republican who called the work "ceramic 3-D pornography."

Apart from the work's vaginal imagery, many art critics have questioned its aesthetic merits. Robert Hughes called it "agitprop," and described the almost iridescent colors as "worthy of a Taiwanese souvenir factory." Other critics dismissed it as banal or too simplistic to be considered true art.

Even among feminists, the work has proved divisive.

"There's a lot of tough feelings about Judy Chicago," said Jones, who was criticized by some feminists for including Chicago in a 1996 exhibition of feminist art. "Some has to do with personal infighting among feminists in the '70s, and some of it is the feeling that her work is too populist."

Born Judy Cohen, Chicago grew up on Bittersweet Place in Uptown and left for the West Coast to study art. She adopted the name of her hometown as a gesture against "male social dominance."